The Tragedy of Western Society on the Commons

5/25/23

When we had arrived, we learned about Elinor Ostrom’s work from Severin, he even left us with a poster of her design principles. Ostrom was a scholar who did research on common pool resources like fisheries, pastures and more relevant to us, water. The standard doctrine of managing common pool resources was that either the State needed to come in and regulate it or you introduce the market and you privatize everything. There was even this famous parable that taught about the tragedy of the commons would arise if people were left to their own devices, everyone would just use up all the resources, and they claimed the only way to stop this was through government intervention or privatization. This the issue we have run into in 2023, when access to water, which is a human right, becomes privatized and only given to the highest bidders. Adding privatization to the water crisis, created more misuse not less, with the richest people hoarding water increasing the scarcity of the common pool resource. However, Ostrom argued that market based “solutions” or government intervention was not the only way. She argued that if people were allowed to organize themselves on the ground, they could actually come up with better management strategies then the market or state could. She observed this in many countries across the world, through her examples were mostly in the Global South. Her observations led her to come up with the 10 design principles, which were basically the patterns that she found in all successful cases of self-organization of resources. Her work was quite influential and ended up winning her a Nobel prize in economics for disproving the tragedy of the commons.

I, however, am not convinced these principles can work in the Global North or any Western society. In the Global South, our culture is different, people take care of each other and look out for one another. In the village, every neighbor knows each other’s name but in apartment complexes in the West, people share walls and do not even know each other’s name! Just about all common pool resources in the United States are managed by the government, even issues that in other countries that are addressed on a village scale are taken all the way up to courts to manage, take for example California’s groundwater (more to come on this tomorrow). But it is not just an issue of lack of familiarity, rather it is an issue of culture. Western society socializes people to be cut throat and competitive, it rewards individualistic behavior. All of the most “successful” business people have backstabbed their partners to get to the top (Ex: Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple). This is the type of behavior our society rewards. It is not just that we don’t know how to work together anymore, it is also that we do not trust each other. We have been abused by our peers so much we can’t turn our backs on each other. It is not that I am blaming individuals but rather pointing out the sick society that we are all a product of.

Which brings me to the group I am living with here, where we are managing a variety of common pool resources, but I will focus on water. It is funny how no matter how small a group is we create microcosms of society. For example, though no official leaders and no men, the people who take charge and come up with the most decisions are either the older ones or more masculine and/or dominant ones, just like society. This is just one example, but here is another. Originally, the plan was to do two gallons of communal water and two gallons of individual water, and out of the communal water we would take showers, wash ourselves and our clothes. However, on the first day, we immediately reverted back to what we know, the privatization model, changing it so that we got three gallons of water individually, and one gallon communally. This way showers and laundry would come out of your own budget not communal, communal was reserved for cooking and washing dishes. At first, I did not recognize what we had just done there, but then we started running out of communal water. Realizing that we needed to share better, especially when we are racking up between ten to twenty gallons in our water storage bank, I suggested we go back to the original model. There was a lot of resistance to this, people offered to make a one-time donation of a few gallons to the communal pot to create communal ice, but they did not want to regularly donate to the communal pot. This reminded me of the USA’s failing healthcare system, which crashed because no one wanted to donate regularly to the communal pot of health insurance to make sure everyone is okay, instead they would rather just take care of themselves. I do not blame these women for reverting back to how they have been socialized, they probably did this for their own protection, because it is the nice people who get used and abused in this society. This is what their Western society taught them, that everyone must behave in the “me first” fashion to make it in this country, this is why the country ran out of water because no one wanted to share and why we have no communal water left to do dishes with.

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5 Comments

Great experiment and fine reflections on what is happening. Good luck to you all!

Central Blue
May 27, 2017 at 5:44 am

There seem to be varying skill sets when it comes to washing yourselves with the available water. Communal use of water would make sense where there was shared wisdom on the best way to proceed with the task. But some of you use 1.5 gallons, and some use .5 gallons. Whose washing deserves to be subsidized and why? What would the communal donation of 2 gallons get you that the donation of 1 gallon does not?

Cooperation is so much easier when everyone is buying into the process. Is there shared wisdom on cleanliness and sanitation? Is the writer of this article a competent bather? I’m sorry, but such questions must be asked if you intend to survive your environment collectively or individually.

Seems to me there are way too many discussions about politics, and the past, and very few about learning and sharing necessary survival strategies in the world you now inhabit. A world which is unlikely to change by all your accounts.

While your group seems to have some access to available information on survival strategies, there seems to have been very little practical effort made to prepare yourselves as individuals or to share any practical skills you have with the group.

Until then, Ostrom’s plan will elude you.

Forget all of the old worlds you came from and put your effort into the new one you now inhabit.

Don’t waste time talking about things that will not keep you alive in the world you now live in.

Nayara
May 29, 2017 at 6:10 pm

Politics and the past are important because they explain the present. This is not an issue of needing to learn survival skills or become a more competent rather, this is an issue of a culture change, creating a culture that is okay with the fact that we are not all the same calling for equity instead of equality. Equality calls for us to be all the same, equity says that we are all coming in at different places so some people will need more and some people will need less to get to the same spot. Some people use 1.5 gallons of water to shower because their hair gets greasy or their bodies are larger, some people’s hair can be washed rarely and it actually looks better, some people are okay with being dirtier. Trying to get us all to use the same amount of water so that we can share equally is not a solution because it erases the very real differences between us, instead we need to become okay with sharing knowing that it is a different cost for us all, this is why a culture change is needed because in the West this type of behavior is foreign and often rejected ( Example: Welfare, being okay that you have a job and pay into a pot so that others who can’t work can still eat and live).